Dispatches from the Creation Wars

The Exaggerations of the Right

Posted by Ed Brayton on April 4, 2005
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A commenter left this on a thread below and it deserves its own thread. Media Matters has an amusing report on Pat Robertson’s appearance on Fox News a few days ago talking about Terri Schiavo. He says:


You know, on my program today, I read in detail the finding of a noted Nobel Prize-winning neurologist named Dr. Himmelfarb.

Not only is he confusing William Hammesfahr with, presumably, Gertrude Himmelfarb, but he’s taken the man’s utterly fraudulent claim of a Nobel Prize nomination and turned it into an actual Nobel Prize! He’s also predictably using this situation to promote the right wing war on the judiciary and argue that the solution is to get more conservative judges on the bench. But it was conservative judges who ruled against him in this case all the way up the line, from the trial judge to the 11th circuit to the Supreme Court. It was the most conservative judge of them all, Judge Birch, who hammered Congress and the White House for getting involved in the first place and passing unconstitutional legislation to do it.

I think we need some sort of hall of fame for non-existent awards. We could put Dr. Hammesfahr’s “Nobel Peace Prize for Medicine” next to Bill O’Reilly’s Peabody award. Speaking of O’Reilly, how about this little gem of stupidity from March 30th:


“Al Qaeda is not the most intense threat to your freedom — it’s the American Civil Liberties Union.”

From the same obnoxious cretin who has also said that, “Hitler would be a card-carrying ACLU member. So would Stalin.” How does any sane person with an IQ over 8 take this idiot seriously?

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Comments

  1. #1 ~DS~
    April 4, 2005

    You’re assuming that accuracy is important to guys like Klayman, O’Reilly, etc. I don’t think they are. I think it’s all about ratings, which makes some sense considering that it’s ratings, not accuracy, which decide the fate of super news shows and talk show hosts.
    You see the same tactics in the Blogosphere. Paul over at Wizbang had several runnign posts ina row where he critiqued ‘evolution’ on an absurd basis. despite constant corrections even from his base ofr eaders, he continued to openly antagonize every one who commented, even at times rewriting other’s comments and singing their name to them. Meanwhile, he was getting linked far and wide on science/political blogs and drew in many readers he wouldn’t have otherwise had. I doubt accuracy played a part in Paul’s tactics, just as it does not matter to Robertson, or the gentlman you debated with on air last week. They’ll keep doing that, until it stops working.

  2. #2 spyder
    April 4, 2005

    O never seems to be bothered at all by his own contradicitions and lies, why should he be bothered by his disparagement of others. He must assume that his listeners are likewise incapable of following along with his lines of rhetoric. And they must assume they actually know all that he is saying. I have begun to realize that with O’Reilly, it is all in the soundbytes, and that the context, of say a whole sentence, and certainly not a paragraph, is no longer necessary.

  3. #3 Ginger Yellow
    April 6, 2005

    Am I the only one amused by the similarity between “Nobel prize nominated neurologist” Dr Hammesfahr and renowned neurologist Dr. Hfuhruhurr from The Man With Two Brains?